Ever since it broke Dave Carroll’s guitar, United Airlines has been the poster boy for doing everything possible to abuse customers in the air. Now it has finally found a niche. United vows not to duct-tape passengers to seats like other airlines. Four years ago, I wrote about companies that somehow manage to demonstrate over…
If you hire experts to train on areas outside their expertise, you’ll pay too much and get a really poor result. It’s like paying a painter to rewire your house. Experts specialize. It’s what makes us experts. I’ll use myself as a case study here, but the same applies to anyone you hire. Imagine that…
In the Harvard Business Review, writing coach Bill Birchard describes how the brain responds to business writing and recommends ways to write better. His analysis generates some fascinating insights, but one key point is missing: business writing works only if if causes the reader to act. It’s worth your time to read Bill Birchard’s “The…
Writing a strategy document is the best way to make sure you, your business, or your organization move forward in a thoughtful way. It’s a discipline you should follow. What is a strategy document? “What is strategy?” is a tricky question, addressed by everyone from Michael Porter to every boss on the planet. But there’s…
In June, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Apple employees that starting in the fall, they’d need to return to the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Many employees signed a rambling and disjointed 1300-word letter of protest. I’ll show how it could be better. The employee plea isn’t effective Consider a ROAM analysis of the…
Briefly: I got paid — and still get paid — a lot more to find fault than I did to be nice to people. When I was an analyst at Forrester Research, my job was to know everything possible about the businesses and processes I wrote about. For ten years, that was the television industry….
Western Digital customers who had configured the company’s external hard drives to be remotely accessible are waking up to find all their data erased. WD has downplayed the problem, hiding its response in a support update. Should WD be addressing the problem more visibly, or is this a case of “buyer beware?” According to Krebs…
There are many ways to draw attention to elements of an email: bold, graphics, larger type, or even colored type or highlights. Using them all at once, heedless of graphic design, only amps up your customer’s anxiety. Reading instructions should not feel like attending a rave. Today’s example is an email sent by a real…
Fastly runs a CDN — a content delivery network that makes delivery of Web pages faster globally. Due to a bug, major Fastly clients including Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, eBay, and Pinterest were unable to serve pages to customers for about an hour Tuesday. Fastly apologized — and its apology is a clinic in how to…